Why I wanted to make my wife cry

Part 1 of some thoughts on love…Wednesday is part 2

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I’ve always counted myself to be something of a romantic. In fact, when my wife and I began our collision course toward marriage, I developed a plan where I’d pull off so many legendary moments of courtship bliss that her tears of appreciation would be as plentiful as coins on Super Mario Brothers.

That…did not work out. Mostly because I expected her to melt each time I gave her a Hallmark card, and she turned out to not be much of a crier.

One night at the end of a date, I took her by the church where I led worship. The entire stage had been decorated with a hundred various candles, and a soft blue spotlight lit the grand piano in the center.

This is it, I thought, After I finish singing her this love ballad I wrote, she’ll be a puddle on the floor.

So I sang to her.

When I finished, I looked at her with an incredible imitation of “the smolder” from Tangled, fully expecting tears to be pouring down her cheeks.

Instead…she looked back at me (completely dry-eyed), smiled and said, “That was beautiful, thank you.”

Are. You. Freaking. Kidding. Me?!

That was so romantic that I almost cried!

Why was she resisting my powerful gestures of love?

She wasn’t. I simply had a huge misunderstanding of the purpose of love.

The whole time I had been trying to use love as a weapon to garner a particular response. I was treating love like a stock; if I bought enough shares, at some point surely it would begin paying dividends. In a strange way, it was as if I was seeing her as an option in a vending machine…all I had to do was drop in the right amount of love coins, press a few buttons, and voilà! She’d be mine.

But that’s not how love works at all.

Actually, learning how to love will end up changing us far more than it ever changes anyone else.

Whenever you see a command for us to love mentioned in the Bible, it’s always associated with sacrifice.

When we love…we are changed.

Love chips away at our fear…

Love lays waste to our selfishness…

Love erases expectations and grudges…

Love requires us to give our lives away…

As C.S. Lewis so poignantly explains, “To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”

The aptly named “Love Chapter” (1 Corinthians 13) is bluntly honest about what love should and shouldn’t be like.

The summary is this: love is generous. In authority, in service, in discipline, in difficulty, in hurt, in relationships.

Of course, the most incredible picture of this is shared in what must be the most famous verse in all of Scripture…John 3:16…

”For God loved the world so much that he gave…”

Before you even existed, He gave. Before you ever knew you needed Him, He gave.

In the same way, the story of our lives should be…

Because we love…we give.

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Who needs you to personify that today?

Are you really pro-life?

When people ask that question, typically it’s loaded with all sorts of political overtones.

However there is a lot more to being pro-life than the subjects of abortion, war, the death penalty, etc.

In fact, while those issues are vitally important to determining the lens with which we view other people, it’s not what I’m referring to at all.

Rather, I’m chasing a more foundational thought…

Are you pro-life or pro-survival?

Living versus simply existing.

Many of us who have been orbiting Churchianity for any length of time have no doubt stumbled across the verse where Jesus explains how His desire is for us to have life to the fullest.

I haven’t found anyone who disagrees with Jesus’ perspective, but what troubles me is how few people pursue it.

We even use the word “life” in our excuses for why we don’t live.

“Well, we had planned on it…but then life happened…”

“Oh you know how it is…life gets in the way…”

The second tier of excuses we use are even sillier…

“Work is just crazy right now…”

“Well, the kids are involved in so many things these days…”

And once we reach the third tier…we don’t even try anymore…

“There just aren’t enough hours in the day…”

Living the abundant life isn’t a far off destination we’re attempting to reach, it’s stewarding well the place where we are right now.

Living life to its fullest isn’t about how much time we have or don’t have, it’s about stocking the shelves of our moments with what’s worthwhile.

My own personal struggle has been breaking free from the temptation to make life all about events. If I could convince myself that I was planning for the next “big day”, then I didn’t have to pay as much attention to the current day.

Even our economies cater to our addiction. Just one example would be how early stores begin advertising for Christmas. They know we’ll cave every time.

So how do we live?

Well, I believe that living begins with listening to the right voice.

When Jesus shared about his desire for us to have a rich and satisfying life, He was painting a distinction between His voice (that leads us to true life), and the sinister voice of The Thief (that peddles in the counterfeit).

When we purchase counterfeits, it might numb our longing for real life for a little while, but it cannot quench it.

And then there’s the issue of difficulty…why must we have pain? Why must we walk through hardship?

To be honest with you, I’m not sure there are any great answers for those questions, but I do know that without sadness, laughter isn’t as cleansing; without fear, we’d never know peace;  without brokenness, we couldn’t experience healing; without sin, we’d never know grace…without death, we’d never understand value of life.

Our Savior is the nemesis of The Thief. He has fought for us, and still fights for us. His life is ours…and His life is the fullest, richest available. It has been said that life begins in the mind of God. That includes yours.

Today…right now…take a moment…assess…

Are you living? Is your family living?

Are you missing out on beauty, community, worship, generosity?

What must change?

Being pro-life starts with you. It’s not a talking point or a political perspective…it’s a beckoning.

Stop surviving. It’s time to live.

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“It was when I was happiest that I longed most…The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing…to find the place where all the beauty came from.” // C.S. Lewis

We’re pregnant?!

“Congratulations!” The young physician practically vomited her excitement all over our stunned faces, “How long have you been trying?”

Trying? We just thought we were practicing!

Barely 60 days into our marriage, and there we sat.

Hearts pounding.

Apparently peeing on multiple sticks doesn’t reverse the results. (Who knew?)

Things were not going according to plan.

Which plan, you ask?

The Five Year Plan™, of course. You know, the one where after arriving home from your honeymoon, a transporter takes you to a magical land where all fighting, fertility, and general life troubles are placed in a holding pattern. That way you and your mind-alteringly hot spouse can begin marriage without the peskiness of real life getting in the way. (That’s the way it’s supposed to work, right?)

We left the doctor’s office and went back to our apartment to mull things over.

I don’t remember it taking very long for us to initially come to grips with our new reality, but the truth is, we weren’t even close to being ready for what came next.

Within just a few week’s time, Jordana was deathly sick, I had been laid off from my job and shortly after she was hospitalized and diagnosed with a serious disorder related to pregnancy called Hyperemesis Gravidarium.

Ever walk through those seasons of life where everything starts getting dark very quickly? Even as I type this, I can still feel all the angst and fear leftover from memory.

There I was, the young husband, anxious to prove myself but left helpless.

There she was, the hopeful bride, ready to launch into a new life and suddenly all the post-it notes of dreams she’d been leaving around the rooms of her heart were stripped down.

Was this a joke?

Were we pawns in some sort of cosmic chess match?

A thought from C.S. Lewis I continually call to mind is, “We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.”

The truth is, our every day theology simply cannot fly in the face of our most difficult days or our most glorious days. What we think we know about why things happen (or don’t happen) a certain way will undoubtedly go through times of ebb and flow. This is part of the epic battle between our humanity and our spirituality.

In scripture, notice David wasn’t called “a man after God’s own information”, he was called “a man after God’s own heart.” There is something much deeper going on in us than simply knowing…

God has called us to a place of being.

Knowing and being were never meant to be a replacement for one another, but rather a compliment.

Frequently I find myself knowing many of the “right answers” about situations, but still end up attempting to complete the mission on my own.

If you’ve ever done the same thing, you know that never ends well.

God beckons us to a place of refuge. But knowing about a place of refuge is not where we find safety…we have to actually go there…be there.

Miraculously, nine months later, our firstborn son, Tobin, was born. We chose that name primarily because it means “God is good.” Realistically, that wasn’t something that was always easy for us to embrace, believe or see, but in the end we experienced its truth.

Much of what we knew had been (and still is being) tweaked and pruned. When the doctor announced we were pregnant, she may as well have said, “Congratulations! God is about to wreak seventeen kinds of havoc on everything you had planned…”

Reality is, most of the times my plans stink, and it takes something drastic to convince me. And maybe it’s not the convincing about the subpar nature of my own plans that’s so difficult, but rather the process of embracing the ones God has for me instead.

Maybe you’ve been where we were. Maybe you’re there now. Maybe you’re awaiting the “painful best” as Lewis would say.

But please hear this from me…from someone who is still stumbling forward along the road of grace: accept God’s invitation for you to come and BE. Don’t fight it.

Cling. Trust. Be. Rest.

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More coming on this Friday…

Does this resonate with you?